One
section of the artificial kidney consists of micro filters, that
selectively expel metabolic wastes from the blood stream. A
secondary part consists BioCartridge of renal tubule cells that
further mimic the metabolic and water balance functionality of a
biological kidney.

Professor Roy, who teaches at the UCSF
School of Pharmacy which specializes in developing
micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology for biomedical
applications, says the project's ambitious objective is to shrink the
massive device to the size of a coffee cup.

The team hopes to
be able to implant the device without the need for anti-rejection
therapies by making it as biocompatible as possible. For anyone
who's taking biomedical engineering course-work on a graduate level
or done biomedical research, it's instantly apparent that this is an
ambitious, but perhaps impossible objective in the short term, given
the body's propensity to encase or otherwise adversely respond to
even relatively biocompatible artificial materials.

Still,
Professor Roy is hopeful, stating, "This device is designed to
deliver most of the health benefits of a kidney transplant, while
addressing the limited number of kidney donors each year. This
could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of
people worldwide, while also reducing one of the largest costs in
U.S. healthcare."

Chronic kidney failure, also known as
end-stage renal disease, affects approximately 500,000 Americans a
year. The disease tends to be directly caused diabetes and
hypertension and given Americans'
growing girth (which increases ones propensity to these
diseases) it is perhaps unsurprising that the number of afflicted is
rising 5 to 7 percent annually.

According to the Organ
Procurement and Transplant Network, over 85,000 people are on an
organ waiting list, but only 17,000 kidneys were donated last year.
An organ replacement is the only cure for kidney failure.

Currently
6 percent of Medicare funding, or roughly $25B USD, goes to treating
renal failure. The government contributes roughly $75,000 a
year to fund dialysis
treatments for each of some of the 350,000 individuals suffering
from the disease.

Dialysis is an unpleasant experience, to say
the least. It require three 3 to 5 hour sessions a week and is
exhausting to patients. And it only replaces 13 percent of
kidney function. However, it's patients' only hope of survival
at this point.

Only 35 percent of patients survive more than 5
years on dialysis.

Besides U of M and UCSF, 9 other teams of
researchers are collaborating on the project, including teams from
the Cleveland Clinic where Roy initially proposed the project, Case
Western Reserve University, Ohio State University, and Penn State
University.

Animal testing (implantation) of
fabrication-shrunk models is already complete. Now the
challenge is to scale up those successes to a human-size device,
which encompasses the functionality of the room-sized construct.